This booklet was reprinted from the Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Tuberculosis for the Russell Sage Foundation. It discusses detecting tuberculosis in the public schools and educating students about the disease.
LUTHER HALSEY GULICK was director of physical training of the New York public schools.
This booklet provides a list of works on the topic of play, as well as a list of stories for children.
GEORGE E. JOHNSON was director of the Pittsburgh Playground Association.
MAUD SUMMERS wrote books on reading pedagogy.
This booklet addresses the need to reform the celebration of the Fourth of July. It includes a letter from President William Taft to Luther Halsey Gulick, the president of the Playground Association of America; a report from the Conference of Municipal Representatives of the Third Annual Playground Congress titled “A Safer, Saner Fourth of July”; and an essay by William Orr, principal of Central High School in Springfield, Massachusetts, titled “Independence Day: A Civic Opportunity.”
This booklet contains two articles reprinted from The Playground. The first discusses the obstacles to developing playgrounds in social centers—namely, the narrow views of taxpayers, the clash of selfish interests in playgrounds’ location and distribution, and the hostility of immediate neighbors on account of the noise and disturbance of so many children at play. The second discusses the importance of playgrounds in cities generally.
GEORGE M. FORBES was president of the Board of Education in Rochester, New York.
HIRAM H. EDGERTON was mayor of Rochester, New York, from 1908 to 1921.
The text of this booklet was originally published by the Massachusetts Civil League and the Playground Association of America. It discusses an upcoming vote at the next municipal election on the question of providing adequate playgrounds. It provides the text of the proposed act creating such playgrounds, discusses the reasons for having playgrounds, and provides quotations from playground advocates, including President Theodore Roosevelt, Hull House founder Jane Addams, and writer Ralph Waldo Emerson.
JOSEPH LEE was a social worker and philanthropist.
This booklet provides a general review of the work of the Public Schools Athletic League and discusses the Athletic Badge Test, a test given to boys requiring them to run a certain distance, jump a certain distance, and pull themselves up to a bar a certain number of times.
This booklet, reprinted from Proceedings of the Second Annual Playground Congress, discusses what the New York City Board of Education has done to provide facilities for children’s play outside school hours, what additional facilities for recreation might be provided, and some suggestions for the administration of children’s recreation.
WILLIAM H. MAXWELL was the superintendent of schools, New York City.
A form listing people and places—including churches, employers, medical agencies, and public officials—that social agencies might have visited with columns for noting the number of visits to each. An explanation following the list notes that agencies using the largest number of outside sources of information will be seen as having made the best investigation into the cases they are treating.
The United States has one of the highest child poverty rates among wealthy countries and stands out among its peers as the only country that does not offer a child benefit – regular payments from the government to most or all families with children, not conditioned on parental employment. During the temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) in 2021, the CTC functioned as a child benefit, and the child poverty rate fell to the lowest level ever recorded in the United States. Despite this decrease, the CTC expansion was not renewed. Concerns about enacting a child benefit include the cost, the possibility of misuse of money by parents, and how it might affect parental employment and fertility. In Child Benefits, social policy scholar Jane Waldfogel details the history and origins of child benefits around the world and comprehensively assesses how child benefits affect family spending, fertility, employment, child poverty, and child wellbeing to address such concerns and to determine the benefits of enacting such a policy permanently.
Drawing on research from peer countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development as well as the United States, Waldfogel shows that a child benefit would prevent poverty and hardship and protect children from deep poverty and income instability. The research is clear that families would spend the money from a child benefit on food, clothing, and other items for their children and that a child benefit would not have large negative impacts on parental employment or family decisions about fertility. It also shows that a child benefit would promote short- and longer-term child and family wellbeing. Child benefits have been shown to enhance opportunity and benefit society through healthier and better-educated young adults and stronger and more stable families. And rigorous benefit-cost analyses indicate that a child benefit, while costly, would more than pay for itself, yielding a large return on investment.
Waldfogel evaluates four current, major proposals for a child benefit and provides recommendations for a policy that would deliver the best outcomes for children and families and the best return on investment. She argues that such a policy would be more generous, not tied to parental employment or earnings, available to all parents but phased out for higher-income families, delivered in monthly payments through the tax system, and provided in addition to existing social programs.
Child Benefits provides fascinating insights on the history and impacts of child benefits and makes a clear and definitive argument for the establishment of a child benefit in the United States.
JANE WALDFOGEL is the Compton Foundation Centennial Professor for the Prevention of Children’s and Youth Problems at the Columbia University School of Social Work and a visiting professor at the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics.
This booklet discusses what 1,038 U.S. cities are doing for the health of school children. The first part discusses medical inspection, including the history of medical inspection, administration, and kinds of medical inspection. The second part covers hygiene of the school room, including outdoor recesses, individual drinking cups and sanitary fountains, modern methods of dusting and sweeping, and instruction in alcohol, tobacco, tuberculosis, and first aid.